Business owners, including small business owners, seek efficient ways to engage their customers in a manner that is relationship-based. They seek customer engagement that achieves long term “stickiness” (e.g., customer retention) and also realizes future growth (e.g., new customer acquisition). To promote these goals, business owners often adopt marketing techniques involving text based communications. Certain characteristics of conventional text based communications in comparison to other marketing techniques are more supportive of these goals. For example, it has been observed that a large percentage of text messages are read in a relatively short time from receipt.